Actually, the USA was not one of the forerunners of rolling-out broadband - although certain American companies were jointly responsible for developing the technologies involved.
The biggest problem that America had regarding roll-out of xDSL is that geographically it is so large, and also that it had been one of the pioneers for traditional POTS back in the early part of the 20th Century, which meant it had an enormous amount of ancient hardware in place that needed upgrading.
Ironically, some of the countries that are leading the way are those that were, until recently, considered undeveloped, eg Romania. They have been installing new telecommunications networks as the countries develop, as opposed to upgrading, so they have less hardware to replace.
This is also the reason why phone phreaking used to also be more easily achieved in so-called more advanced countries, like USA, Canada, Western European countries, etc... because they didn't necessarily have to replace the old analogue equipment (which was old but still working for normal voice communications), with new digital equipment that was more difficult to hack.
Of course, things could come round full circle, as even newer technlogies are invented, and those countries currently considered to be bleeding-edge are those at the back of the pack, and other countries (China for example) could take the lead.
Finally, an interesting statistic that I remember hearing from a Partner in the telco side of a firm I used to work for was that half the worlds population have never ever made a telephone call. It kinda brings things into perspective a bit, eh?
